Over the last five years, we have seen an explosion of bigger retailers increasingly using data to drive their sales and profitability.

Data-driven sales is a huge thing today for traditional large retailers especially those who operate in the online space. Dedicated specialist teams sifting through data and creating plans that are used by marketing teams is standard practice today.

With increasing competition especially with the boom in digital means embedding consumer insights into their sales process is an absolute MUST.
Online retailers can boost sales and profitability with good use of insights.

Amid this punishing environment, Seventy Nine works with a number of clients who implement an insight-driven sales strategy.
As part of our work with Google and with the Google Partner status, we are hosting an event looking at the shopping trends for 2018. Armed with this information, online retailers can recreate their online strategy in line with the insights from this event.

“Retail Trends and Insights 2018” will be hosted at the Seventy Nine offices in Leicester.

The event takes place on 14 November 2017, 8:45am at

Seventy Nine, 1a Gower Street, Leicester, United Kingdom

RSVP: Hayley on 0116 319 0990 or email info@seventyninepr.co.uk

REGISTER FOR THE EVENT:Click here to register for the event https://goo.gl/kaxFpW

The reign of content as the king in the world of digital marketing has been of an unusual length. But has its tenure come to an end? We raise this question because we are seeing a dramatic decrease in organic reach from business pages on Facebook and Instagram compared to two years ago.

Brands on social media will have noticed that the ‘create great content to reach and convert your fans into customers’ formula is no longer working without budget. Creating memorable and ultimately shareable content continues to be king, but a powerful queen has emerged: dissemination.

As a rule of thumb, you don’t want your ads to be shown more than four times to the same person in a week. It is also worth considering to build an audience based on their responsiveness to your content.

Reach

Facebook offers an abundance of options to build your target audience. Keep in mind that you want to build your target audience based on people who are most likely to respond to your offer. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to target those who are most likely to engage with your ad (unless your goal is ad engagement).

Your target groups might use social media quite passively. Nonetheless, they are most likely to buy your products or services. The extensive audience building tools on social media allow you experiment and compare. Once you found your niche audience you can start tailoring your offers to their individual profile.

Let’s say you’re a pizza company and your customers consist of young adults, students and families. You have found out that these three are your three most valuable target groups. Chances are that students won’t respond to promotions offering discounted meal deals for three as much as families hoping for an affordable family lunch. Creating an ad set recognising the needs of these individual target audiences allows you to reach the right audience with the best impact.

Content

The better you understand your customer’s sense of humour, their interests and problems, the more relevant your content will be. A customer who thinks ‘this brand just gets me’ should be the ultimate goal to keep in mind during this self-exploratory exercise.

To conclude, content deserves a seat in the front seat when it comes to advertising strategy. However, it is pretty much worthless if it is not seen by the right eyeballs. Just like a king struggles to rule over a kingdom he does not understand, understanding reach and frequency will give your content the authority it deserves.

This week we saw a new exciting feature on the ever-expanding list of Instagram features. Meet the polling stickers-a fancy little functionality allowing brands to directly request feedback from their fans. The new polling feature can be added via the “poll” sticker and allows brands to see results in real time.

Adding polls is similar to adding any other sticker on Instagram: simply drag and drop it onto the image in your story, and you can automatically customise both the question and choices.

Ever since Instagram added the stories feature, they have been investigating ways to make it more interactive, from adding story search for hashtags and locations to integrating it with live video and so forth. The average engagement lies at 20%, at Seventy Nine PR, we managed to achieve an engagement rate of just under 35%.

People viewing your story will be able to tap on a choice to vote, which will then show them the overall results so far. To see the results for yourself, simply swipe up then click the viewers list, and it will show you the total number of votes, who voted, and what they chose.

Just like the story, your poll and its results will disappear after 24 hours, so we recommend to gather the data within the allocated time period. Considering that Instagram shows the profiles of the users who answered, it is possible to add their accounts to a database. You can then can re-target them or approach them via direct message on Instagram.

This tool will be pivotal in shaping the future of Instagram marketing for businesses. It will allow businesses to get fast input from those who matter the most- their consumers. From a restaurant planning a new dish, to a fashion outlet considering releasing a new clothing line. This tool will allow for businesses to directly communicate with their audience like never before.

You can expect to see Instagram themselves use the polls, for their own research. Perhaps, this will be a way for them to get feedback from users on updates or features they want to add. So hopefully we will see less A/B testing and more conversations.